It is that time of year again for NCAA hoops.
College basketball's postseason has been underway for a little over two weeks with everyone now turning their attention to the NCAA Tournament. The discourse on whether the NCAA should expand the tournament reared its head again with multiple mid-major teams being left out of March Madness.
Over 30 coaches spoke with The Athletic about what they think the NCAA should do moving forward. Here's what they had to say.
Coach in favor of expanding the NCAA tournament:
“Expand to 96 teams. Instead of playing two games on Tuesday and two games on Thursday in the play-in games, you play 16 games on Tuesday, 16 games on Thursday. And you don’t want to cheapen the automatic bids, so the automatic bids have byes. So it still incentivizes the automatic bids. Take a team like Gonzaga — they lose in their (conference tournament) finals. When there’s only 68 teams, maybe they get in, maybe they don’t, but they deserve it. But with 96 teams, they get in but not with the automatic qualifier. So the 32 byes are automatic qualifiers, the next 64 are at-large teams that play to get to play against the automatic qualifiers.”
Coach not in favor of expanding the NCAA tournament:
“This isn’t a participation thing. You compete to win. You’re working to win games to earn your way into the tournament. Expanding the tournament may make more money but it lessens the specialness of it, it lessens the elite status of who gets in. So you want to figure out how to create an algorithm that’s better in selecting the best 64 teams or to figure out how to include more teams that are winning? Then do that, but don’t just expand it because that’s the easiest thing to do.”
Coach undecided on it.
“There’s a lot of parity right now. That could make for some really competitive games. Because there are going to be a lot of teams that don’t get into the tournament this year that are good enough to be there. But I’m a purist, and I don’t like change.”
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